The Demon-Haunted Mind

Demons exist only within the human imagination, but that doesn’t make them harmless. If positive religious world views can result in a more positive state of mind, then might belief in soul-clawing, life-wrecking horned Hell fiends edge one closer to the edge of madness? Join Robert and Christian as they explore a recent study on the topic, and they might even summon a demon or two from the realms of myth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger,
and today we are revisiting one of our favorite, maybe
not favorite topics, demons. Yeah, this is what's what's funny

(00:24):
about this is, I remember when when you and I
first started recording together, we at some point said, oh,
we should do an episode on demons. And I even
have some like preliminary notes that I ran across yesterday
for a demon's episode. Yeah, and I think early on
we kind of decided, oh, there's not we can't really
do just a demon episode, and it for a while

(00:45):
we kind of didn't discuss demons. But then recently we've
had a couple of episodes. We did the Exorcism episode
Exorcism Addorcism and uh, and here we are talking about
demons again, proving that yes, there is plenty to talk
about um in terms of science and the human psychology
and demons. So we kind of proved ourselves wrong in
that one. Yeah, exactly. Well, today's episode is primarily based

(01:07):
on a new study that we got our hands on,
and we want to go through it because it's a
really interesting look at how the belief in demons, despite
whatever religion you participate in, the belief in demons may
possibly contribute to negative mental health effects. Uh. And that
is especially interesting give it in light of like things

(01:28):
that we've talked about related demonology before Exorcism. Obviously we
talked about mental health in that episode, but we've also
talked about satanic panic on the show. I think one
of the first episodes I did before I was even
a host on this show, we did Grimoires. Is that right,
talk a little bit about this satanic panic before you that. Yeah,
Grimoires was one of the first ones I did. Yeah.

(01:49):
So we've covered a lot of territory with this. If
you haven't listened to those episodes, I recommend going back.
But oh yeah, John d Yeah, yeah, I guess he
was technically trying to talk to Holy angels. But that's true.
But a lot of the same texts do get referenced
in between a lot of these things. Uh. And this
is very much grounded in present day, although we will

(02:10):
occasionally refer to some you know, demonic concepts from the past, right. Uh.
And one of the things that I think is especially
drawing me to this topic over and over again. And
I've mentioned this on the show before, is that I
am working on a comic book series is actually about
like the occult and exorcism and demonology. So I'm kind

(02:30):
of constantly have out of the corner of my eye,
I'm looking out for new information surrounding these topics. Oh yeah,
I mean same here. I'm I've always been fascinated by
demons and um, I have a few different writing projects
that have involved them over the years. And uh and
and just I think our personal history cost of this too.
We talked about on the on the show before about

(02:52):
your experience with snow blindness and a supernatural interpretation of
that sort of ye, and then my own experience. It's
growing up in the first Baptist Church and especially during
high school, they're being some friends who were carrying out
quote unquote exorcisms, and there were tales about demons, uh

(03:12):
and at work in the world around us. We go
in depth into those stories, into the exorcism addercism episode,
and that's not that old, so I kind of feel
like we we shouldn't repeat them here. So if you're
you know, they're not necessary to understand this episode, but
we might refer back to them occasionally just as our
subjective experience, because I think that that is definitely going
to be how we uh what lens we look at

(03:35):
this study through, because this study is pretty fascinating. Now,
as far as specific demons go, we've we've again, we've
talked about demons here on the show. We often dip
our toes into the waters of mythology and folklore and
discuss a few, uh on the podcast. On the blogs,
we discussed just some of the following demons, the wind

(03:57):
to Go, the Wutong Shin, fox fear, It's Google's gin
Incubi Succubi, uh, you are Raju, Lucifer bahamat Uh. We figured, hey,
we're gonna look at this study, let's just roll out
a couple of additional demons, sort of podcast versions of
demon trading cards almost that you can you can you

(04:18):
can appreciate with this before we dive into the study.
And Robert's too humble to mention this, but I will
mention that most of those that you just mentioned have
Monster of the Week entries over on our site Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. So if you want
to learn a little bit more about those things are
just dive down the monster rabbit hole that Robert's created
on the site. Go ahead over there. So all right,
So the one that I picked is actually the one

(04:40):
that I've been researching the most for that project that
I'm working on. Uh. And this comes from the Lesser
Key of Solomon, And there's a so we've we talked
about this in the Grimoire episode. Lesser Key of Solomon
is a book supposedly containing a sort of occult knowledge
passed on by King Solomon. But first section is the

(05:01):
rs Gisha. I think that's how it's pronounced, but I'm
not a hundred percent sure. It's it's old timey, old
timey Grimoire talk. But anyways, so basically that first section is, uh,
this it just contains descriptions of seventy two demons that
Solomon was said to have evoked. He used like a
religious magic to summon them, and then he confined them

(05:23):
into a bronze vessel, and then he sealed that with
magical symbols. Uh, and then he basically made these demons
work for him. So this is a you know, I guess,
a bit of mysticism that takes the Bible stories from
the Bible and transmutes them. So my favorite and the
one that I'm really focused on for this project I'm

(05:44):
working on, is a demon known as Zagan and he
has the rank of king and president. Uh So, there's
a lot of various ranks in terms of like what
how they fit into a hierarchy with one another, all
these seventy two demons of Solomon's uh in king and
President is pretty much like the highest one. Uh So,
zagain is uh he and we we were talking about

(06:07):
this beforehand, like they all have various legions, but they're
more powerful than one another based on what the number
of legions that they command are. And their legions are
like lesser demons. Yeah, and this makes me think, surely
somebody may have already done this, but this would make
the Demons of the Gramore's perfect for trading cars, especially
since you have all those fabulous woodcut illustrations of them. Yeah. Well,

(06:29):
the there's the wood cut illustrations from I think somebody
did them after the Lesser Key of Solomon was originally created.
But then there's also all of the seals that are
in the Lesser Key of Solomon that like show the
various like inscriptions that you're supposed to use in order
to seal these particular demons up in this brass canister. Wow,
I can I can picture it right now? Yeah, And

(06:50):
then and then down there bottom. How many legions do
they have? Look on the car, Well, Zagan has thirty
three legions. These are also his superpowers. Are you ready?
He can make men witty. He can turn wine into
water and water into wine, so he's a little Jesus
ey there. But he can also turn blood into wine.

(07:11):
So imagine this like he can turn your blood and
your body into wine. That would hurt and probably kill
you too. That would definitely, I mean, if it's a
demon doing I don't know. There's so many additional magical
questions come into play there, like does that mean that
my body is like a wine based circultory system now exactly? Yeah. Yeah.

(07:32):
His other powers are that he can turn metals, any
metal into a coin that are made of that metal. Right, So,
if there's like gold or he can turn it into
gold coins. He's just like, uh, this like magical coin
making process. Uh. And then the last thing about is
again that I think is pretty interesting, is he takes

(07:53):
the form of a griffin winged bull, but then he
like eventually turns into a man. So there's like various
interpretations of him where he sort of looks like a
minotaur with wings. Oh yes, yes, I think I've seen
these before. Yeah, so that's again. I've got some text
here from the the actual book itself. It's pretty difficult
to read because it's, like I said, it's in that
old timy kind of writing where it says like the

(08:16):
sixty first spirit is called zagain he is a great
king and president and appearith in first ye form of
bull with griffin wings, you know, stuff like that. Um,
but yeah, it's basically all the things that I mentioned earlier.
It's just a list of his superpowers. This is really
like like if you look at the Lesser Key of
Solomon with a bit of skepticism, it's it's like the

(08:36):
official handbook to the Marvel universe. Now what. The one
thing that's interesting about this particular demon, especially in terms
of where we're gonna be talking about today, is that
this seems to be very much a wizard demon right
in that there wasn't anything really negative there, unless you
count turning wine into water, like if that's the worst
case scenario or possibly the blood in your body that

(08:59):
same like the most dangerous one. Yeah, but for the
most part, it's this is a powerful entity that a
wizard would enter into a careful pact with and have,
if not control over, then at least a lot of
guidelines set in place. Yeah, Like I imagine like the
idea was sort of that, because keep in mind, there's
seventy one other demons like this, Like you would summon

(09:20):
one demon first that could create gold or from copper
or or something like that. Right, this is all alchemical.
It's very John d And then you're like, oh, but
I've got this gold or but I can't just spend it.
I can't just go to town and drop this, you know,
on the table at the local bar. I know, I'll
summons again and I'll keep him bound in the seal,

(09:40):
and then he'll turn these all into coins for me.
So being a wizard, a demonic wizard was was was
really kind of like being a project manager. Yeah, it's funny.
That is kind of how the lesser key of Solomon
portrays Solomon in a lot of cases. Yeah, Like at
least how he the way in which he used demons
and angels. You know, it's like a recipe book. I

(10:02):
like to imagine him doing like a big like a
Google meeting with all of these everybody's teleworking in from
whatever layers of the abyss they're occupying, and he's like,
all right, where are we on the progress a progress
for this project? Do we have the ore? When are
we When are we actually pressing these into coins and
moving on to step three? Step three is turning his

(10:23):
blood into a wine. So if this is an example
of a demon this very much under control, we certainly
have plenty of other demons that are out of control.
Like this is kind of the rich man's demon versus
the the everyman's demon. Well, I think yeah, it's worth
remembering too that like the Lesser Key of Solomon, wasn't
like a mass produced book, right, Like there were only

(10:44):
a few copies of this. We talked about this in
our grim Wire episode, and they were mainly owned by
a rich, learned gentleman. So for for my pick, I
figured I might entertain an Eastern demon for the second
selection here, and I'm gonna buck my recent trend of
focusing on Chinese or Indian myth and instead turned to
the island nation of Japan. Oh yeah, they've got some

(11:05):
really quoted in mythology. So the the Only is probably
the best known or one of the best known Japanese demons.
And you can you can split up split hairs over
the definition of demon or spirit or evil spirit, etcetera.
But I think for the most part the Only lines
up with the demonic definition, and I think it suits
our purposes here. Since is Carol Rose describes in her

(11:27):
book Spirits, furious lepricuns and goblins. You have two varieties
of owning. First there's the ghaki, which comes from Hell
and drags souls of the dying down to Hell. And
then there's also a terrestrial version of the owning that
shifts its shape, assumes human forms to torments specific individuals
and they made themselves. Be quote, the distorted souls of

(11:49):
women who have died of excessive grief is the ones
I know mostly from dungeons and dragons. Yeah, they're in
the Monster Manu. I have to say some of my
earliest encounters with the japan These monsters were in the
the Monster Manual supplement for what I can't remember the
name of their eastern uh so it orient it was

(12:12):
it was the orient for adventure it is now it
would now be offensive. I forget. I have the book though,
Yeah it was. It wasn't Kootoa, but it sounded something
like you had a caved in character. Ah, there we go. Yeah.
I remember just being fascinated by the monsters in there,
and then later learning more about, you know, their actual
models in in myth and folklore and and the monster

(12:34):
Man did a pretty knock up job. I thought of
bringing these to life in the game system, but the
only was definitely in it. Now, these particular only the
terrestrial ones. They bring misfortune, They spread disease, especially plague,
and there's a ceremony the Shinto only yarrachi, and this

(12:55):
as well as conversion to Buddhism can drive the only out. Now,
this is in terms of possession, right, not in terms
of like if an ony, like if an one is
haunting your home or something like that, or is that
also my understanding? It is it's like haunting a home,
haunting a region, more or less plaguing an individual and
individual's household. Got it. Now? In the in the former example,

(13:18):
the Gacy, we see a vision of a demon that
partially embodies the fear of death but also seemingly increases it,
so you're gonna die, yes, but also like terrifying monster
is going to drag you to hell as it happens.
Surely there's got to be some some Japanese horror films
that have incorporated the one. I guess maybe we're just
not like super aware of them. Well, there are a

(13:39):
number of Japanese films that deal with the the with
the the The yo Kai you know, broadly categorizes these
different monstrous spirits, some more comical than others. Uh, there's
and I want I want to say there have been
a couple of black and white Japanese heart films, earlier
horror films that definitely explored this idea of an only

(14:01):
we gotta we gotta do a trailer Talk episode based
around stuff like that. Yeah, for those of you who
don't know, we do every Friday, well almost every Friday,
at eleven am Eastern Standard time, we do a trailer
Talk Facebook live episode where Robert, Joe and I talk
about the preceding weeks podcasts in relation to movie trailers,

(14:22):
basically monster movie trailers related to this. So I'm assuming
we will do something based on demonology in the coming
weeks for this one. Now, I want to also drive
drive home that terrestrial only that we mentioned there. That's
a firm Eastern example of a demon that spreads earthly
misfortune and can be driven away or defeated via religious practice. Okay,

(14:43):
that's important related to the study that we're going to
talk about today. I know some of you are like, guys,
you've been talking about D and D and weird monsters
for ten minutes now where we'll get there. But but yeah,
as long as it's an evil supernatural power, it doesn't
necessarily have to be codified as a demon per se.
It applies to this study right Like another one real

(15:04):
quick from the Japanese traditions and from the Monster Manual
is of course the Kappa the cop about the sort
of monkey like turtle creature with a little intention in
the top of its head filled with this water that
gives it you power or is its life force, And
it's basically one of those demons and these existing and
just demons or evil spirits that exist in most folk traditions.

(15:27):
Hangs out around water, so it's associated with drownings and
misfortune related to swimming and being working around water, but
you can if you encounter one of these things, the
legend goes, you can defeat it by bowing to it
like a nice low bow. And then when the kappa
bowels to you, it will spill the water from its
head and lose its power. So it's kind of like

(15:49):
a golem, like the way that like if you wipe
the golems, uh, the inscription on the golems head off
of it like becomes inanimate again, like if the water
falls out, it just kind of dissipates. Yeah, and and
the thing I love about this is that essentially you
defeat the demon by the use of strict Japanese adequate,
which I'm gonna have to research this more a bit,

(16:09):
but I'm instantly drawn to that that idea of it.
You're not necessarily using religion here to defeat this demon,
but this demon may be defeated by proper etiquete. Yeah.
Well it's a very proper demon, all right. So we've
rolled out a couple of demonic examples here. Uh, and
now it's uh, I think it's about time to move
on with the discussion of the study. Yeah, so the

(16:31):
paper in question here, it just came out in seventeen.
It's called Demonic Influence the Negative Mental Health Effects of
Belief in Demons, and it's by Fan Hoo, Ni Knee
and Daniel Vier Olson, and they both come out of
Purdue University's Department of Sociology. Real brief abstract here, but
we're going to really break down this paper. Uh. Their

(16:52):
research indicates that among young adults, belief in demons is
one of the strongest negative predictors of mental health. They
also found that belief in demons can lead to lowered
mental health. But they also are very clear and they
clarify lowered mental health itself does not necessarily lead to
a greater belief in demons. So if you're uh, if

(17:14):
you're depressed, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're more likely
to believe that demons exist. Right, and in this and
the time and time again in the study, they tackle
this idea, you know, because you might ask the question,
where you is it really possible that belief in demons
leads to ill mental health or is it just a
situation where someone who already is suffering from some sort
of mental health scenario, Uh, they are more likely to

(17:37):
believe in demons. They tackle that and there's a there's
actually a lot to this study, Like there's some interesting
sort of cognitive science to this study as well that
I think is really important. Um, you know, we are
obviously using the demon framework because it's attractive to us, right,
but I think that this has broader implications as well,
just for like mental health in general. Oh yeah, So

(17:57):
all right, you're probably saying, well, who believes in demons? Right? Who?
Who are these people that are affected? Maybe some of
you listening are those or and you're thinking, well, I
believe in demons, and I feel fine, you know, uh,
but here's some statistics for you. According to Baylor University,
they conducted a religion survey in two thousand seven, and

(18:19):
they found fifty four percent of the United States absolutely
believes that demons exists. That is a surprisingly high number
to me. I'm I'm very surprised by being over half
the population. Yeah, it's it's interesting to think that over
half the country believes that malicious extra dimensional creatures actually exists.

(18:40):
Though I'm sure there's gonna be some variety regarding to
what degree they're active in the world, or if it's
just a situation where oh well, I follow this religion,
be it Christianity or Islam, or or Buddhism any or Hinduism,
and you just kind of fall back on the idea
that while there are demons in the text, demons in
the belief system, and therefore I believe in them. I

(19:02):
think my assumption was, despite whatever religious beliefs you participate in,
that most people don't actually believe in supernatural evil. But
I guess I was wrong. Um, And I think that
that's really interesting, and especially you know, calling back to
my experience from when I was a kid and I
had snow blindness and I thought that a demon was

(19:23):
coming for me. Uh, you know, I guess like I'm
not alone. Apparently like this is a pretty common thing.
It's it's more common than it's not even going so
far as they said that an additional nineteen point five
percent of the population. On top of that, I think
that demons probably exist. So there's like a they basically
said not at all, maybe or absolutely, uh, And so

(19:47):
there's more people that think absolutely, and then there's more
people that think maybe. There's far less people that think
not at all. May be either kind of hedging their
pets there. I don't know, maybe I think it's also
really important to remember though, that historically the belief in
supernatural evil has evoked not only fear, but it's it's

(20:07):
been able to evoke death in some people. Right. You
think about people who were so concerned historically about having
curses placed on them that they had like a heart
attack or something like that. Right, Like, this has such
a strong foundation in our cultural contexts that you know,
I can see sort of why it permeates so thoroughly. Yeah,

(20:28):
I mean, because it goes back, it goes beyond the
sort of modern religions, that goes back into very folkloric beliefs.
Just the I just as humans are grasping with the
chaos of life and the unpredictability of life and then
trying to answer why it's happening. Uh, you can, It's
it's handy to fall back on explanations off, Well, there's
a malicious spirit at the lake, that's why this drowning occurred. Uh,

(20:52):
there is a where there's a demon in my mind,
and that's why I did this particular atrocity. You mentioned
disease earlier with your with your only example, I mean,
disease was blamed on demons and curses a lot. Yeah,
you know, so it was. You know, that's why I
think that like the Handbook to the Marble Universe kind

(21:12):
of works here, right, because like demonology was sort of
the cultural way that we understood the unexplainable in the world.
Not that there's people now who are like, why why
it was there a tornado that struck down in my backyard?
It must have been thor right, like there nobody thinks that,
but there is that meticulous kind of record keeping of

(21:35):
of what's going on with these various mythological characters. Yeah,
and so much of it does boil down to taking
a threat, often a kind of ambiguous threat, personifying it
as a creature monster, and then also having a system
to drive that monster away. So you're taking you're you're
taking a threat that is invisible and unpredictable, boiling it

(21:57):
down into something like a predatory animal essentially that is
predictable and defeatable and in a certain amount of solace,
I guess can come with that as well as a
great deal of anxiety, because you've now created a worldview
in which there are malicious, magical creatures out to get
and as we're gonna find out throughout this study. Having

(22:18):
such a belief triggers something in our brains that leads
us to further negative beliefs that impact us in in
not healthy ways. All right, well, on that note, let's
take a quick break, and when we come back, we're
gonna jump even more into the study here. All right,
we're back, alright, So let's set up this study. Okay,

(22:42):
you've got some notes here specifically about the you know,
the evaluation and the costs and benefits of being religious. Yeah,
and these are these are examples of the the authors
of the main study here point out. So on the
opposite end of the perspective, you have the Bitter and Suite,
An Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of Religiousness by

(23:04):
Kenneth I. Pargament in two thousand two. And this is
a paper that explored whether belief in a loving God
had a positive effect on mental health. And the author's
work implied just this. So the idea you know here
is pretty obvious. You you bring in this religious worldview
where you you believe that there is a loving God
looking after you, and that is going to lead to

(23:27):
just a more positive experience of reality. Yeah. So they
basically they have this literature review where they cite studies
other studies that have been done these this isn't the
first study that's looked at the positive and negative associations
with religious beliefs. The positive ones include the one that
Robert just mentioned about their being a loving God. But
then also people have positive mental associations with religion when

(23:50):
they attend church, when they rate the importance of their
religion in their life, when they pray, and if they
believe in an after lay. And then of course, relating
to the first one, you mentioned, a secure relationship with God.
So it's not enough to just believe that God exists,
but that God you have a secure relationship with God

(24:11):
and God loves you. Yeah, because obviously there are plenty
of modes of belief in God where God is terrible, terrifying.
You don't have to look far to find that vision
of of the Almighty and and uh. And certainly there
have been a number of studies that have attributed negative
influence to self rate of rated importance of religion, particularly
as it revolves around belief in your own sinful nature

(24:34):
uh and other factors. Because even in the Christian tradition,
you're gonna have different models of Christianity that lean more
heavily on the idea of avengeful God or loving God,
on the idea that you're you you're weighted down by
original sin, or you're free of original sin because you
decided to follow this particular religious path, etcetera. Yeah. One

(24:55):
of the other things that they found that I thought
was interesting is even though prayer has a positive association
to it, if you're worried about the frequency of which
in which you pray, like how much you pray per day,
that has a negative impact on people. Um. So, for instance,
there could be an association between that and mental illness

(25:15):
because people who are already mentally ill might pray more
to cope with their difficulties. And there's other studies that
have found similar associations with beliefs in the punishing God
that you mentioned obviously, and not believing in an afterlife,
So that can cause undue stress as well. Yeah, because
the belief in afterlife is often brought up as a
positive one, right because it would arguably alleviate some of

(25:39):
the stress associated with death. You're like, oh, I'm gonna die,
but hey, I'm gonna be with everybody in the afterlife,
it's gonna be happy and good. It's comforting to think that, right.
This is like basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs stuff. Right,
like that you're you're secure basically that you're safe and
the like the idea um that the these things are

(26:00):
sort of forming a cultural I don't know, safety net
for you, right is comforting. Yeah, it's crazy how we
we we build the safety net though, and each of us,
to be clear, it kind of builds their own safety net. You.
You may have the basic designs handed to you with
varying degrees of detail by by your particular faith or

(26:21):
whoever your sort of faith leader is, officially or unofficially,
but you were you were designing the exact parameters of
it based on your your attention to the details that
were given. Yeah, so let's go back to this paper
in the negative association part. Yeah. So, as far as
negative associations go, this ni Olton paper is the first,

(26:43):
apparently to make an argument for the negative associations of
demonic belief. So they're the first to really narrow in
on demons alone and say, well, how does this how
does this play into the positive and negative manifestations? And
so They employed a what's called structural equation modeling system
or s e M with panel data, and they used

(27:05):
the National Study of Youth and Religion or the n
S y R. And they do this to to show
that a belief in demons leads to later changes or
declines in mental health. Yeah. Uh, and we want to
remind you too, they said they found no evidence to
support the idea that poor mental health leads to a
belief in demons. Right, so, uh, Demonic belief, though, is

(27:27):
a predictor of future mental health issues. But that doesn't
necessarily mean that if you're depressed or anxious or whatever, right,
that you're necessarily going to go all of a sudden
pick up the lesser key of Solomon and be like,
these guys are all real. Yeah yeah, so and if
you're not, If that doesn't make any sense to you,
bear with us. We're gonna get into more detail about

(27:49):
this so you'll understand how how belief in demons could
lead to a decline in negative in mental health. So,
this latest study explores an aspect of what's called e
t a S, the evolutionary Threat Assessment system theory, and
this is the brain child of Kevin J. Flannel E,
Senior research researcher at the Center for Psychological Research at

(28:13):
the University of Hawaii. So the idea here is that
certain brain structures uh in the human brain, involving the
prefrontal cortex, the olympic system, and the basil ganglia, developed
to assess and respond to threats. This system stands as
humanity's evolutionary threat assess assessment system e t a S.

(28:34):
So when no clear threat exists, it may fire up anyway,
kind of like an autoimmune dysfunction, and this can result
in a vast array of anxiety and O C D yes.
So this is actually very similar to the theory that
we're also going to present in this week's other episode,
which is about bats. Totally different topic, but about bats
immune system, there's this theory that their immune system is

(28:55):
is just always on, and it sounds like this theory
for us is that our evolutionary threat assessment system is
always on and it's mental instead of physical. So it
seems to be causing us with social anxiety, paranoia, obsessive
compulsive disorder, general anxiety. All of these things are manifesting
of it. Right, So what's the upside to this? Fight

(29:18):
or flight warning system constantly being on. I would assume
it's alertness, right like being aware of your surrounding, situational awareness,
that kind of thing. Well, I think you can think
of it in terms of household security system. Okay, so
you have the security system in place, right and it
has a it took up to the phone line or
a cellular system. So if certain sensors are triggered, it

(29:39):
will call the authorities or call your you know, an
agency that will contact the Okay, but you're gonna have
But then it depends on where those sensors are, what
to how jacked up those sensors that happen to be,
you know, how your door, your window, etcetera. Right Like,
So here's an example that might'm gonna I'm gonna take
the US and and really work with this metaphor. Uh.

(30:03):
I have an alarmed system in my house, and we
have a motion sensor that's in the living room. But
anytime we arm the system, we have to specifically enter
in a code to disarm the motion sensor in the
living room because I've got two dogs and two cats
and they just constantly trigger it. Yeah. I've had the
same scenario in the past where I had to actually
tape up motion detectors in the house to keep animals

(30:24):
from trigger. Right. And that's so if we're looking at
this from this metaphor that this is the uh the
e t a s right, that that's that's almost like
a mental health upkeep right. It's like you're going, hey,
you know what, Yes, that that sensor is going to
trigger when a specific thing goes off, But you need
to teach yourself that it's actually not harmful. It's just

(30:46):
the dogs and the cats, right or And this all
comes down to worldview, and that's the the idea here
is that your personal worldview is going to dictate what
additional sensors are added to your suit, your personal security system,
as well as to what degree are they amped up.
So you know, obviously the door getting broken in or
an entry occurring while you have the stay at home

(31:08):
alarm on, that's going to trigger anybody's a system. But
do you also have like a crazy motion detector in
the living room or a hallway um or or or
on the porch in a way that like bowling leaves
or passing truck is going to set it off. That's
kind of the idea here. Yeah, So it boils down
to two worldviews, and this is how FLANNELI argues it. Uh,

(31:31):
And it's it's sort of based around, you know, how
risky you feel the world is. So the first worldview
is a cynical one, and that's where you think that
other people are generally selfish and shouldn't be trusted. The
second one is when the world is generally equitable, uh,
and it's thought to be fair and just. Now, depending
on which one of these you lean toward, it could

(31:53):
alter the threshold at which you respond to certain perceived
threats in your environment. These responses can be both functional
and dysfunctional. Right, So Flannel E is basically arguing that
the equitable worldview is less threatening and raises the threshold
to trigger our e T A S systems. Now, for me,
I gotta be honest, like, if I have to choose

(32:15):
between those two, I'm I fall into the cynical worldview camp.
You know. I wish I could say that I didn't,
but I do, you know, but probably based on a
combination of nature and nurture stuff, I definitely uh feel
like the world is a selfish place and I shouldn't
necessarily trust other people. I know that that's not healthy,
and it's something that I've been working on and will

(32:37):
probably continue working on for the rest of my life.
But that's how that's I know that that's what sets
off my triggers. Well, I think a lot of us
do have to sort of juggle those two different versions
of the world view, right because I'm I'm in my
own mind. I'm often I can find myself sort of
the encountering the two budding heads of you know, your
encounter uh stranger, say on the street, and there is

(33:00):
that there's the temptation to want to view them. I
was another that could be potentially dangerous, etcetera, and uh,
and then there's the other side that reminds you, well,
this is just a person. This is just somebody, probably
much like yourself, and people are basically not horrible. Um.
It reminds me of when I first moved to the
South from Boston, because in Boston, you walk around on

(33:23):
the street, you see a stranger, you don't look at them,
you look down, you walk past them, and you ignore them. Right. Uh,
here you see a stranger. They waved to you, they
say good morning, they smile at you. And I was
like freaked out by that. At first, I was like,
what what what do you want? You know, like that
was my reaction. And it took me. I've lived here
for eleven years now, it's taken me this long to

(33:44):
get comfortable with it to the point where I noticed,
like I was just in Seattle a couple of weeks ago,
and I was walking around on the street and started
smiling and saying good morning to people, and they were
looking at me like I was crazy. Well. One thing
to keep in mind too here is that when we
say the world, the world is basically a good place,
world is basically a bad place. There of course, it's
going to be different worlds for any individual. There's often

(34:05):
my world and then the other world. So in certain
religious situations, you could be the world withinside within your
own church, within your own faith, and then there is
the outside world. Or you live in a rural environment
and then there's the other world of the city, or
vice versa. Totally. That's something I encounter a lot since
I grew up in a more rural setting and I

(34:26):
live in a more urban setting, So I encounter people
who have the attitude of, you know, distrust the rural
environment or don't go out into the country to lose
your life here in Atlanta O t P. Yeah, but
then you also encounter the same thing right where people
are like, oh, if I go into Atlanta, I'm probably
going to die. I've absolutely encountered that. Yeah. I did
a job interview once where somebody told me that he

(34:46):
specifically never came inside the perimeter to Atlanta because he
wanted to just avoid anything to do with the city
for basically those same reasons. Hey, this is a total tangent,
But I have to ask, have you listened to S
Town at all yet? No? I have not. Okay, I
think you'd like it. Um. I know Tripod month is over,
but and probably if our listeners are listening to us,

(35:08):
they've probably checked out US Town already. But man, it's
good stuff. And it's very much related to this concept
of urban versus rural identification. I'll have to check that out.
Uh So. So the basic idea here again is that
a person's beliefs about the riskiness of the world in
general effects their e t a S. So, in other words,

(35:28):
the exact worldview you have can alter the threshold at
which the e t a S starts kicking in. Yeah,
and it's worth remembering too that in many religions, as
we talked about, sickness can be viewed as being caused
by these demonic forces. Right, So let's say you've got
a cynical worldview and you believe in demonic forces, so

(35:49):
you're going to be constantly on high alert that something
is being caused by them. Right, Demons and evil powers
are depicted as the enemy of God or the gods,
depending on what you know particular religion subscribe to. So
it makes sense to hypothesize that if the reverse holds true.
Since previous research implied that belief in a loving God

(36:09):
was associated with better mental health, these guys said, we
should probably take a look at what belief in supernatural
evil does as well. All right, So Na and Olsen
they focused on again on the n S y are
the Natural Study of Youth and Religion. This is a
research project directed by Christian Smith, professor in the Department
of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and it

(36:30):
entails at and ninety Americans. Now you might be wondering
why this one, right, Well, they said, quote because it
is one of the few high quality panel studies with
so many detailed questions about religion, religion questions that are
repeated in each way of the study unquote, And it
also covers the time in people's life when they quote

(36:51):
experience significant changes in both really religiosity and mental health.
So a lot of this relates to the expected challenges
of growing up, takeing on new responsibilities, encountering new stresses,
and often experiencing reduced interesting religion. Yeah, so they liked
the n S y R because it specifically addresses those

(37:12):
concerns for young adults. Now, think about it. You know,
back to maybe some of you are young adults and
you're listening to this, but back to when I was
a young adult. You know, it's a time when you're
more likely to experience changes in your religious beliefs and
your mental health. Uh, consider all the stresses of being
a young adult, your financial responsibility, that frequent relocation, the

(37:33):
resulting weakening social ties as you move away from your
friends or your family. Maybe that's not identifiable for everybody listening,
but for me, that was absolutely the situation. Like I was,
like I had that kind of bank account where I
was living check to check for like probably most of
my early twenties. Um, I did. I hadn't lived with

(37:54):
my parents for a long time, and my parents didn't
even really have like a central location home anywhere that
I could go to much less like you know, a
hometown with friends and family in it that I felt
like was like kind of a safe fallback for me,
you know. So there was a lot of that stress.
And I then I think about it, and I'm like, well,
this was also probably the beginning of the end for

(38:16):
me in terms of religiosity. Um. And I say that,
but I have to clarify, you know. Uh. And I
think I brought this up on the show before too,
that like, I'm not religious in the sense that I
follow like a particular organized religion, but I do have
I guess, spiritual beliefs you would call them. Right, Um,
this sounds a little hokey when I'm saying it out loud,
but like, I don't identify as an atheist. No. No,

(38:38):
I think this is good because I have I have
kind of a similar spiritual trajectory there. I like, I
I when I look back on my life, when I
would have lined up with their study, and I think
probably my belief in demons was it was probably at
its at its high point then, because this was again
a time when there were stories of people encountering demons

(38:59):
performing extress is um. Uh. This idea of sort of
spiritual warfare uh and Christianity was seemed to be very
prevalent at the time, uh, at least in the circles
I was I was moving in and uh. And since then,
like that has changed. So today I'm I'm I'm certainly
not an atheist, but I I do not believe in

(39:20):
the existence of demons or or hell. And I feel
like it's it's kind of like one is given a
big lunch tray full of items, and these contain both
that edible and inedible religious ideas contains beneficial and uh
and and at times, you know, highly destructive religious ideas.

(39:43):
And over the course of your life, you you figure
out which ones you can get rid of, which ones
you can throw in the trash, and just keep the
the items on the plate that that have a positive
effect on your life and your worldview. Yeah. And actually,
you know, what you and I are both talking about
from our subjective experiences lines up with what they found

(40:03):
in the N S y R. Uh. So it's a
longitudinal study. It covers three waves of ages, uh, starting
with thirteen years old to seventeen years old. For me,
that was peaked demon time. Uh, then sixteen years old
to twenty one years old, and then again from eighteen
to twenty four years old. Of these respondents, UH, now, ideally,

(40:24):
the guys who authored this paper we're talking about today,
they would love a survey that had more data relating
to items with depression, right, but that just wasn't built
into this particular study. UM. They did mention though, that
there is another study that that found that there is
a you know, a common transition to young adulthood that
is characterized by a rapid decline in religiosity. Uh. There's

(40:46):
also the two thousand ten National Survey on Drug Use
and Health, and that found that thirty percent of young
adults that's people eighteen to twenty five years old, reported
having had mental illness in the last year. And then
people who are ages twenty six to forty nine and
that's you and me, were down to and then by

(41:06):
the time you get to fifty or older, you're down
to fourteen percent of that population reporting mental illness within
a year. So it seems like and this this kind
of lines up with my experience, not only just like
as me as an adult in my challenges with mental health,
but also the people around me that I've encountered that
the older you get, the easier it gets. I don't know,

(41:28):
easier is maybe like, uh, maybe a little bit too
like heavy of a term to use, but that, um,
coping mechanisms come into place. Yeah, Yeah, definitely, coping mechanisms
come into place. And uh, and I guess in many
cases to the opportunities for major battles with one's um,
you know, particular mental health scenario come about they've passed. Yeah. Um. Now,

(41:52):
in terms of coping mechanisms, though, it's worth pointing out
there have been a couple of studies. Uh. They site
Blaine and Crow and then another two thousand study they
present the idea that the religion can and does serve
as a coping strategy during this time for many people.
So the corporamis here is that believe in the loving
God makes the world seem predictable and secure. Yeah. Like

(42:14):
I was talking about before, this is one of those
key phases of human needs if you look at Maslow's
hierarchy of needs, right, but if you also have a
belief in evil supernatural beings that makes the world seem unpredictable, insecure,
and dangerous, and it leads us to anxiety and stress,
just like any similar tangible effects would, right, think of

(42:34):
crime or war or disease. Right, So the belief in
these uh, you know, evil beings, whether they're demons or
or what have you, uh sort of contributes in the
same way that those real world factors do. All right,
we're gonna take one more quick break and then we
come back. We'll jump back into the study. All right,

(42:57):
we're back. So in this study, the researchers used the
the SCM model, and this treats uh two variables of
mental illness and belief and demons as simultaneously independent and
dependent variables. So at its core, their methodology is designed
to improve on previous studies that only looked at college

(43:19):
students that weren't suited sample wise for finding causal influence
between the religious and mental health variables. So they determined
mental illness based on five observable mental health items. Again,
they were kind of limited by the questions in the
study just because this wasn't a study. The survey itself
wasn't a survey that they wrote. They took a pre
existing survey that had pre existing data. Yeah, they're basically

(43:41):
taking a pre existing body of data and then computing
that crunching the numbers there to answer some questions that
they had. Yeah, So they looked at depression, sadness, loneliness, misunderstanding, uh, purposelessness,
social invisibility, um, you know, the feeling of being unloved.
And they left off a sixth theory a guilt. Yeah.

(44:03):
I remember reading that part there. It wasn't a sure why,
but I think it was that they didn't feel like
there was necessarily a correlation between guilt as it was
defined in the survey and mental health as they were
defining it as a negative trade in association with belief
in demons, if that makes sense. Alright. So these mental

(44:24):
health items were in turn backed up with frequency ratings
one through five, always through never. Demonic belief came to
a scale of one to three definitely, maybe or not
at all. And the researchers also took into account items
from the survey related to so called positive benefits of
religion so angels, afterlife, belief, etcetera, as well as demographic

(44:46):
measures and they all loaded all of this into a
program and computed. Yeah. I mean, we could walk through
this like incredibly complex mathematical methodology that they had. But
if you're that interested, go find this paper or talk
to these authors. I'm sure they'd be happy to tell
you about it. I don't know necessarily that it's listener
friendly for us to walk through equations, right, we will

(45:07):
just be brief and say this is where the mathematics happen,
and then we get the findings. So the findings are
broken down into four tables of data and and here's
the real take home with a with a lot of
caveats about the limits of the survey information and the
fact that mental health is a diverse construct, all right,
because that's that's instantly the you know, the problem anyone's

(45:29):
gonna have. And especially if anyone starts saying, oh, well,
you know, this is just a soft science, etcetera. The
researchers definitely take this into account and say, yes, this
is just this is just a study. We're trying to
tackle something that is very difficult to to tackle in
the form of mental health. Here's what here's what they
have to say. Quote, when predicting mental health. Self rated health,

(45:52):
an obvious predictor of mental health, is the strongest predictor,
followed by feeling close to God, but believing in demons
and evil spirits is the next strongest predictor of mental health,
with an effect size that slightly edges out belief in
angels another supernatural belief that is strongly correlated with belief
in demons, but that has a positive relationship with mental health.

(46:16):
And then there's another quote here I want to read
that really drives home their their findings. The STM results
also suggest that the negative associations of demon belief and
mental health cannot be explained by reverse causal influences. Mental
health has no apparent statistically significant effect on later changes
in belief in demons. Our results suggest that the main direct,

(46:38):
non spurious causal influence between those two variables is from
belief in demons to declining mental health. So this is interesting.
This is where I sort of come up with my
own theory that I am probably not going to write
a research paper on. But I'm curious what you think
and then what also the audience thinks. Okay, so lining

(46:58):
up with what we've talked about previous Lee on the show.
We have an inherent cognitive dissonance here, right, at least
with Christianity, I think the Christian God that you and
I are familiar with. And and that's also something we
should note is that this is a study because it
was conducted in the United States, most of the respondents
self identified as Christian. Wouldn't it stand a reason that
if you believed in a Christian God, you would also

(47:20):
believe in demons per the Bible? Right now, that gets
in what I was saying before and how you were
talking about it, sort of the lunch train metaphor, right
that you sort of take pieces, um, you we think
of it as being like, well, if you're Christian, you
believe in in a loving God and you believe in demons,
you believe in everything that's written in the Holy Book, right,
but not necessarily right, um, and so but let's let's

(47:45):
continue that. If that's so, you've got this weird tug
of war going on between the positive mental health of
believing in a loving God and the negative mental health
of believing in evil supernatural forces. Those are sort of,
you know, cause in cognitive dissonance within you. I would
imagine that this manifests in questioning of faith, right, Um,

(48:07):
and that leads people to ask, why would a loving
God allow these evil things to happen? Well, that's that's
that's quite a final question to respond to them. Um.
I would say that one thing to keep in mind
is that evidence has shown that that even if cognitive
dissonance is not like like just super strong in one's mind,

(48:31):
a lot of us are going to have multiple beliefs
kind of sharing the same space. I've seen this is
written about, particularly in terms of the afterlife. So an
individual who follows, you know, Christian tradition, and they might
have like three different modes, like they might sort of
believe in ghosts even though their faith and there that

(48:51):
they're sort of their faith brain and their reason brain.
Don't believe in ghosts is sort of a pop cultural
um idea of ghosts that's still difficult to share. Yeah,
I totally know people who aren't religious at all who
are like ghost hunters. Yeah, So I mean you can
your your brain has a room from multiple interpretations of
the same thing. Now, the first question that you ask

(49:15):
is it's kind of deceptively complex, isn't it. Because you
put your if you put your faith in an ancient
text like the Bible, there's generally a certain amount of
selective interpretation or selective reading involved. To say nothing about
the sort of curated selective interpretation based on the particulars
of your faith the faith leaders, translators new and old, etcetera.

(49:38):
So to what extent after, you know, after everything, are
demons in the gospel literal? Are they figurative or they
misinterpretations of mental illness? Uh? And if we do confront
the fact that religious faith is a selective invocation, uh,
should we just not go all the way out with it? Right?
Should we just cast out the bad, all the negative

(49:59):
aspects of religion to get in the way of improving
your life? Um? And it kind of comes back to
the salad bars lunchroom tray scenario that I keep keep
thinking of the idea that you're either you're either choosing
what you decide to put in your brain and into
your personal worldview, or you're deciding what you want to
scrape away after additional additional information has come to light

(50:24):
in additional uh, you know, life experiences have occurred. Um.
That's my personal take anyway, is that you we we all,
we all are are tinkering with our worldview. We're all
selectively um adding or or removing things from our religious faith.
So why not just create the ideal? Edit? Why not

(50:45):
taking all the negative stuff, cast the demons aside, cast
the hell aside. Uh, just use those elements that are
gonna have a beneficial effect on your worldview. I think
it's entirely, entirely possible for most people. Yeah, I do too,
And I like I look at it, you know, I
pulled back the lens and I kind of look at
the world around me, and I see there's a struggle
sort of religiously between like fundamentalism and then what what

(51:08):
fundamentalists see as sort of a hypocritical Christians, right, like
the who are not practicing everything by the book literally? Uh,
but then what is by the book? It brings me
back to the preacher on the Simpsons asking that writers.
He said, if you actually read this book, technically we're
not allowed to do anything right? Right? Right? Well, yeah, exactly,

(51:28):
And I guess I think about it more as like
the lunch train metaphor that you're talking about that self care, right,
because if you you take the lessons from that, uh,
that work for you, That allow you to have positive
mental health that make you feel good about yourself in
the world around you, don't make you cynical like me.

(51:52):
Then then that seems to be a good thing, right, Um,
Whereas like, if you take this very strict interpretive view
that it seems like from this paper's findings, that's when
you lead to you may be following it by the letter,
but you're subsequently making yourself unhappy and maybe dysfunctional. Yeah.

(52:13):
I always go back to this, uh this one like
Bible study encounter I had when I was in junior
high and I forget even how it came up, but
I we were talking about one thing and we had
this this old remember of the church who was given
the the youth talk there, and I was asking about
the Book of Revelations. I was saying, well, what's this
about this multi headed dragon? Is this coming to place?

(52:36):
You and I were similar kids, And this guy was like, like,
don't even worry about that. Like like he was like
pretty much straight up, just don't read the Book of Revelation.
What does that have to do with anything? And at
the time, I was like, oh man, that sucks. I
want to talk about the dragons and the demons and
all the cool stuff that occurs. But I find that
that that that his view is more in keeping with
the way I currently approach models of religious faith. Yeah. Yeah,

(52:59):
I think about my dad, who have talked on this
show a little bit about before, and like, you know,
my father is has become more religious and and sort
of more strictly interpretive as he gets older. And like
I mentioned that last year he thought the world was
going to end for sure in October because they were
like specific conspiracy theory sites that he went to that
lined up all this language from the Bible that really

(53:22):
pointed to October of twenty sixteen is being the time,
you know, um, And and he he looks at the
Book of Revelations and he tries to sort of decode it, right,
and all of that seems to make him unhappy, Like
it's obsessive in a way, and like he's trying to
figure out what the answers to the world are. It's again,

(53:43):
it's the whole cultural context thing, right, Like how does
this piece of culture tell me how this world works
around me? Because everything is so chaotic? Like I remember, um,
one of the things he used to talk to me
about when I was a kid was like, oh, well, clearly,
whenever it references like a swarm of locusts in revelation,
what that actually means is like a battalion of army helicopters.

(54:06):
Because if you were John and you were teleported into
the future and you saw helicopters, you would think they
were giant locusts. Okay, So it was stuff like that. No,
I see, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I think
that that lines up exactly what we're talking about here
to what extent are are these details of one's religion, Uh,

(54:26):
going to have a negative effect on just the way
you interact with the world, in your expectations of the world. Yeah,
So back to the study. The authors actually they found
that the literature on spiritual warfare, meaning the religious literature,
and they looked at a lot of pentecostal stuff that
allowed these beliefs to actually coexist. So I'm I was
talking about the cognitive dissonance of them coexisting, but they said, hey,

(54:49):
sometimes the texts can actually make these things co exist. Um,
so believers in a loving God can still experience negative
events which validate their idea that demonic forces can act
in powerful and unpredictable ways to disrupt their lives. They
were also confused by one of their results. They said,
previous studies have found that people who say religion and

(55:10):
spirituality are important to them have fewer depressive symptoms, but
they found a negative relationship where it was a predictor
of future changes in mental health. They didn't have enough
analysis to be comfortable including any of that in the
conclusions from their results, but they said, this was kind
of an odd little blip that popped up when we

(55:32):
were crunching the numbers. The other thing they did want
to recognize, there's a bunch of limitations as a study.
This is one of those studies that's really good in that,
like at the end it says, here's all the problems
with our study, Hey, please go replicate it and try
to rectify these problems that we weren't able to. So
they said that they would have liked broader measures of
mental health and the survey obviously, also, the study was

(55:52):
limited to young adults, and therefore they didn't gather any
data un middle aged and older adults, so they weren't
really able to tell whether or not the negative relationship
persists in older age, although from previous literature, it seems
like it doesn't uh. And then finally, like I said earlier,
the study was only conducted in the US, so Christianity
is the dominant religion here. Yes, there were other religions

(56:14):
that were represented in the survey, but not in the
way that they would be if we were conducting this internationally. Yeah.
And and it's worth driving home that there's still plenty
of room for anxiety concerning supernatural evil UH and the
afterlife and the judgmental aspects of one's god or pantheon
in in various religions throughout the world. Like I often

(56:37):
come back to Tibetan Buddhism as an example of this,
where we often have this this sort of academic Western
view of it, where we just think of this this
you know, wonderful art, fascinating system, and it is a
fascinating UH system, and the and the art is wonderful.
But we often have this more spiritual interpretation of it

(56:58):
that is a bit a moved from what I understand
to understand to be a more common Tibetan UH interpretation
of it, where it's more it's it's more anxiety base,
there's more of this there's a lot of energy that
goes into worrying over your transition to the next phase
in the in the in the wheel of life. Yeah,

(57:18):
I guess at this point in my particular life, like
trying to figure out how the world works is less
important to me than trying to figure out how to
be healthy and functional. Um. Now, I'm interested obviously in
the other stuff. Otherwise I wouldn't show like this. But
you know, there has to be a balance there. Now,
I want to ask the audience, and I mean, I

(57:41):
don't know if there's an answer apparent right here in
front of us, but why do you think it is
that this, this thing, belief in demons is the strongest
predictor of future changes in somebody's mental health. That's really
curious to me. Um. So, you know, I'm We've definitely
presented our subjective experiences he yere. I know from listeners

(58:01):
writing into us in the past when we do demonology episodes,
they've got a lot of experiences with this too. So
I've just I've been interested. Yeah. Plus, you know, I
want to hear from anyone, you know, people out there
who are faithful to varying degrees, tell me how to
do how to have this belief in demons factor into
your personal belief system and can can you can you

(58:25):
actually argue that they benefit your religious worldview in any
way aside from sort of the classic well if I
believe in this, I have to believe in this. But
what if you didn't have to believe in b along
with a Could you discard it and still have this
system work for you? I've always thought of it, you know,
especially based on my experience with um, with being going

(58:47):
to that Southern Baptist school and I was a little kid.
It's like the electric chair of religion. Right, It's like
this deterrent um that's built into the very identity of it. Right,
It's like, if you don't do the right thing, this
will happen to you. Yeah, which, yeah, that's that was
how it was always taught to me. It was like,
if you are not a good Christian and you don't

(59:08):
let your soul be saved, then you will become possessed
and you will murder your family. Yeah. And this this
gets into the like the larger philosophical question, right people
are people good because there's a payoff for being good?
Are the only good? Because there is some supernatural or
or real physical force there to make them behave, and

(59:30):
that remains an open question of discussion with strong arguments
for the ages. All right, Well, if you want to
write us in and talk to us more about demons,
we'd love that. We are all over the place on
social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler,
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of the links to those sites on stuff to Blow

(59:51):
your Mind dot com. That's where we've got the blog posts,
where we've got our videos. It's where all that monster
stuff that I was telling you about that Roberts composed
over the years, lives and every single podcast. All right,
and if you want to get in touch with the
old fashioned way, shoot us an email at Blow the
Mind how stuff Works dot com for more on this

(01:00:19):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works
dot com